jOHN Pochée BIOGRAPHY
This folder contains reviews and articles pertaining to Eric Myers’s biography of the late Australian drummer/bandleader John Pochée, who died in November, 2022, Readers can click on the INDEX button for a list of reviews or articles in this folder.
The Last Straw
THE GREAT JOHN POCHÉE: PLAYING THE CHANGES
Interviewed by Trevor Graham
Music Maker, November, 1971
Historians of jazz music in Australia will find the 1960's a period of intensive multi-State small group activity. This was an era when a very mobile collection of good players alternated between the El Rocco in Sydney, the Fat Black Pussy Cat in Melbourne, The Cellar in Adelaide and the Hole in the Wall in Perth. Drummer John Pochée established a strong reputation during those years as a thinking drummer capable of great rhythmic freedom. Since 1969 small group jazz appears to have declined and this is possibly due to so many of these good players moving overseas. John is currently rehearsing, two out, with alto saxophonist Bernie McGann, and it was in Bernie's quartet that John recorded for the APRA-CBS album Jazz Australia - a recording that led to John being the first drummer to perform publicly at the Sydney Opera House…
JOHN POCHÉE: NOT THE BITTER END
by John Clare/Gail Brennan
Jazz Magazine, Summer/Autumn edition, 1986
There is a sense here, as in most places, of an underground, an esoteric brotherhood which has the real thing, and of an esoteric group of listeners (natch!) which alone has recognised it. Some of these listeners have taken to ink, usually with unfortunate results. Viz: “Sitting close to them is often like being in the teeth of a tricky surf. The drummer develops more momentum than anyone playing in Australia, but he does it by running around the beat and pouncing back to scare it on. There is a sustained hissing, scary crashes, deep thuds of punctuation, waves of energy which veer and nearly topple. When an overloading of cross rhythms is unsnarled to reveal new transformations of speed, or when the alto player begins rocking crazily — spilling out bright demented trills and lightning bolt phrases placed unpredictably over his instrument’s range — then their contemporary fans, who do like to sit very close to them, will yell giddily, yip and moan, and the whole effect is like a rampage of shrilling pygmies through rainforest…
John Clare
BELL LECTURE: JAZZ POSSIBILITIES REALISED & DENIED
by Gail Brennan/John Clare
Second Annual Bell Jazz Lecture, October 8, 1994
Was there a time when we were not looking back on some other time - some Golden Age - of which the present is a pale reflection? It seems that many cultures have a dreamtime, a golden age, a time when things existed in their purest essence, when legends were made, when the gods walked the earth. Many individuals have such a time in their lives…